VMware Live Recovery Reviews

My clients use the product for disaster recovery planning. 

The solution helps to improve business continuity processes. Its automatic failover and failback policies have been wonderful. 

VMware SRM needs to improve its pricing. 

I have been using the product for one to two years. 

I rate the tool's stability a six out of ten. We encountered a couple of issues with certification. 

I rate the tool's scalability a seven out of ten. 

I rate the tool's ease of deployment an eight out of ten. It takes a few hours to deploy. 

We achieved ROI in time when using the product. 

I rate the tool's pricing an eight to nine out of ten. 

Our clients are enterprise customers. I would recommend the products to others. Its scalability, its stability, syncing capabilities, and security features make it valuable. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

In my company, we use VMware SRM for its disaster recovery capabilities. It is a tool for automating and orchestrating the disaster recovery of our company's IT environment.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances. You can demonstrate that your disaster recovery is foolproof without encountering any disaster in your IT environment. You can demonstrate to your company's leadership team that business continuity is available for all applications. Even in a disaster scenario, one would be able to recover their environment in a certain period of time.

Currently, the recovery manager is primarily for only VMware environments or virtual machines running on VMware. Suppose the recovery manager can be extended to a non-VMware environment. In that case, we can integrate all of the tools in an IT environment together and function using one single recovery manager. Allowing for integrations with non-VMware products and environments will really help.

I have been using VMware SRM for more than ten years.

It is a pretty stable solution.

Scalability will not be applicable to VMware SRM since it is a product that does disaster recovery. Its scalability can be considered because you can add additional nodes to the product if you want to scale while ensuring you have the required licenses.

We use the solution for more than 100 customers.

The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment. It is not the tool but the process that is complex. The tasks associated with using the tool in an environment for disaster recovery are complex.

The product's deployment process takes around three to four weeks to complete.

For the deployment process, you need to assess your environment before getting into the design phase, after which you need to understand the business objectives and goals clearly to design your target environment. Once your environment is ready, then you need to understand the steps you need to follow to configure VMware SRM to achieve your target state. I would say assessment followed by defining a clear business objective, and then after design, you have to build the environment.

There is a need for an architect to take care of the design part of the solution, along with a couple of engineers and a dedicated project manager to run the product during the deployment phase. There is a need for at least two engineers to run the product.

The licensing costs for the product are perpetual in nature. A person needs to buy the license only once there is a need to buy support on a yearly basis. The licensing cost for VMware SRM is expensive.

I recommend those wanting to use the solution completely understand their own environment since VMware SRM is meant for VMware environment only. You cannot integrate VMware SRM with other non-VMware products. If your requirements are very much restricted to VMware alone, then VMware SRM can be a good choice for managing activities related to disaster recovery. If you have a mixed environment, you need to think and look for other products in the market other than VMware SRM.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

Our initial deployment of VMware's Site Recovery Manager in conjunction with PostgreSQL for automotive sales, and also involved integrating SRM with HP's triple storage systems. It leverages background storage replication to ensure stable and reliable business continuity.

Stability and ease of installation, along with straightforward maintenance through the graphical user interface, make this solution a practical choice. It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution.

The primary site lacks adequate equipment, such as power backup and cooling, which can lead to downtime during issues like power outages or overheating.

We have been working with it for six years now.

It is a highly reliable solution.

It's important to note that the scalability of the solution should align with the customer's needs. If they anticipate increased workloads and data, they can easily scale up their storage systems. Site Recovery Manager simplifies this process, as it doesn't necessitate extensive reconfiguration, instead, it involves adding or extending data links in the replication groups, making it a straightforward and manageable process. It is well-suited for mid-sized and small companies that don't have extensive data replication needs. It's a practical choice for businesses in need of a reliable and scalable disaster recovery solution that matches their specific requirements.

VMware offers excellent support for its products, and we haven't encountered any noteworthy issues or negative experiences in our interactions with their support team.

Positive

In addition to our existing setup, we use backup software, Veeam, for replication on the disaster recovery side. With Veeam, we replicate virtual machines from the primary site to the secondary site. It is particularly advantageous because it doesn't require the same storage type on both the primary and secondary sides, which gives us flexibility and allows us to mix and match storage types if needed. One of the key benefits of Veeam is its ease of management, making it a valuable resource for replication. I believe it has a promising future, especially for handling data replication in various sectors. We also employ Veeam in the banking system to replicate data from different strategies across multiple departments. Its performance in replicating virtual machines is superior to SRM. The choice between SRM and Veeam largely depends on your storage environment and replication needs.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward.

The implementation process typically involves setting up VMware, configuring virtual machines, creating storage blocks, and installing the necessary components. For VMware to work seamlessly with the storage, a connector from the storage vendor is installed within the VMware environment, and once this is in place, replication can begin. In cases where there's a substantial amount of data to replicate, and the customer lacks a robust network link between sites, a physical transfer of data is undertaken. This involves physically moving storage devices from the primary site to the DR site, initiating the replication process, and then returning the storage to its original location once replication is completed. The replication process usually takes around two weeks, which is considered suitable for customers with relatively uncomplicated needs. For smaller customers with ten machines or so, replication is organized into groups based on different data sources on the storage system. Implementation requires the involvement of one or two technical experts who are well-versed in the equipment and storage systems. Monitoring the system is primarily the responsibility of the customer, with one or two IT personnel overseeing the process. Email notifications are often set up to keep track of system performance and any issues that may arise.

It is reasonably priced, and its cost hasn't been a significant factor in our implementation. We utilize various licensing options, but we typically purchase licenses upfront, avoiding monthly or yearly payment structures. We often opt for multi-year agreements, and if technical support isn't required, it allows us to maintain the same number of virtual machines and central traffic capacity.

If you're dealing with a more stable and homogeneous storage environment and have technical reasons to favor SAN, then SRM, which is tightly integrated with the storage vendor, may have some advantages. Veeam is a better solution when you have a mix of heterogeneous storage types, multiple sites, and diverse data replication requirements, as it operates independently of the storage application. For larger customers, such as those in the banking sector with diverse storage systems and extensive data replication needs, Veeam might be preferred. While it might have a slightly higher price point compared to SRM, it offers more flexibility and scalability. SRM, on the other hand, is well-suited for smaller customers with simpler storage environments and a smaller number of servers. It's more straightforward to configure and manage in such scenarios. Overall, I would rate VMware SRM ten out of ten.

We use SRM to invoke DR and to move workloads across the DR side.

The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management.

VMware SRM lacks certain functions that other platforms have, such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles.

I've been using VMware SRM for a long time, almost ten years.

It's a good and stable product. They do a lot of testing.

I think it's scalable. When you work for big organizations, I don't think that's much of a problem. There are multiple and fairly large clusters. That's one of the ways that we reduce cost because we are building things like sequel clusters. Approximately 5,000 people use SRM at our company.

The technical support is great. VMware staff help with deploying and testing. In terms of building storage clusters, metro clusters, stretch clusters across sites so that, you get all of the benefits of a local cluster, but they're deployed between the lines and the DR side. It's a fantastic technology and VMware provides you with their best people.

Positive

Before VMware SRM, we were using Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas Replication Manager for stand-alone. When we went to virtualize, we moved to SRM. I did a lot of work with IBM PowerVM and it had some nice features. It had things such as better prioritization of allocation of resources and Boot profiles where you could put one VM across another so that it grabbed the resources. You could do things such as have thin DR VMs without much allocation of CPU or memory, and then as you boot them, they start to grab all of that automatically from all of the non-prod. Functions like that were quite good in Power VM, which aren't quite as present in the VMware world. PowerVM is extremely expensive to use and that's why everyone is shifting towards commodity computers.

I'm an architect so I did not install SRM myself, but I think there were no issues with installing it since it's a pretty standard tool nowadays. It does not require much maintenance. We are still running some old versions of VMware as there was a challenge around Oracle licensing. We are moving the Oracle workloads off of it now and addressing the architecture to get rid of the copies of the legacy versions of VMware. 

SRM is quite pricey and the license is renewed annually. I think that they do a lot of ULAs, the universal license agreements, where you pay a set amount and get unlimited usage. That's how it usually goes with big companies. Occasionally, they do true-ups to work out how much you've got and whether ULA pricing is appropriate. It might be too expensive for smaller organizations.

I would advise new users to start off with manual processes and document exactly what they want to come up with in the right order. Get your IT continuity plan defined very closely and with a great amount of detail. Then start to automate with your SRM tooling to make sure that things are brought up in the right order and ensure that if one service fails and you need to bring another one across for latency purposes, you really understand all of those requirements before you start to just implement SRM and marching on without really understanding how the services tie together and the dependencies between them.

Overall, I would rate SRM an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for disaster recovery. We use the solution for two different sites, as well as our virtual machine backup. In a situation where one of our data centers goes down, our servers can go up on the other site.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the automatic recovery of the virtual machine if it goes down. In the event the VM goes down, we can either power it up automatically or manually depending on how we have the solution configured. When configured to power up automatically, the copy in the VM will power up.

The solution currently has a five-minute RPO, meaning if the VM goes down we can lose up to five minutes of data which is a big deal when it relates to database replication. The solution can be improved by reducing the RPO time to zero.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We only need to add a host whenever we want to expand our cluster.

The initial setup is straightforward and user-friendly. Depending if everything in the network layer is okay, we can configure VMware SRM for both sites in less than an hour or less. The replication process will depend on the size of the VM, so if the VM is large enough, the replication process will take some time. However, the configuration of SRM is straightforward.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have a standard enterprise license for the solution.

The cost may be based on the number of simultaneous replication which is the limitation of the standard.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

The deployment and maintenance can be done by one engineer.

I am the consultant solution architect, and sometimes I am the deployment engineer.

I seldom ask for support from VMware because most of the problems are caused by bugs, which we can usually fix ourselves by consulting the knowledge base on the VMware website. However, there are times when the problem is at the hardware level and VMware is not at fault - for example when there is a bug in the VMware version used by the hardware vendor. In these cases, we need to ask for support from the hardware vendor.

VMware SRM is a great solution. I always recommend the solution because it is a native replication solution for VMware. Although there are other solutions such as Zerto, they may deliver a lower RPO in certain cases. I believe Zerto is a better solution than VMware SRM, but when it comes to functionality, and for regular customers, VMware SRM is enough.

We use this solution to run our applications and our server functions.

We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable.

We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved.

We have been using this solution for around 10 years.

We have found this solution to be very stable so far.

We have found that the technical support team are not always competent enough to help with our issues, and often have to escalate them.

Neutral

We found that the initial setup for this product was quite easy.

We implemented this solution using a third-party team.

The level of licensing required for this solution is dependent on the server instances in use.

I would advise organizations who wish to use this solution, to ensure that their threat protection software is in place and up to date, as there isn't any threat protection embedded in this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It was working very well with VMware since it's a VMware product. We didn't have any issues. It was quite smooth when doing drills, when we were trying to recover VMs from other sites.

There's an option where you can test VM, when you can test the drill. That option was very valuable.

It's easy to set up. 

The solution is scalable. 

It is stable. 

Technical support can take some time to respond. We'd like a faster response. 

In the previous year, we were using SRM, and then we shifted to another software called CR2. We're replacing SRM. However, we used SRM for a few years. It's been about four years. 

The solution is stable. Its performance is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product can scale well. It's not an issue. 

We have three or four people on the solution right now.  They are mostly infrastructure engineers. 

We don't have plans to increase usage. 

Support is good, although we would like them to be faster. 

Positive

We had a simple vertical setup. We have VMware engineers at our disposal, and their expertise made it easy.

The deployment took one to two days. It was not complicated. We only needed one or two people to handle the deployment and maintenance tasks. They are engineers and junior staff. 

We pay a yearly licensing fee. 

We have some nodes which are still running VMware. We currently do have some nodes still running VMware like ESXi 7.0, however, not for production. It's right for testing purposes.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I'd recommend the solution as it is very stable and does the job. 

We use the solution primarily for off-site disaster recovery. A site act as the headquarters, and there is also DR site. This means that we move application data from primary to secondary sites for storage level replication purposes. We also back up our virtual machines and their applications to the DR site. Essentially, we do disaster recovery from the primary site to the DR sites.

Before using VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, we were running on a batch storage solution backup, which was conducted by one of my team members. However, prior to carrying out the copying, he backed up the application to local storage before copying it to the tape drive. This means that the storage controller must be up before copying was made to the tape drive, which clearly precluded the possibility of us restoring the backup. There was nothing we could do when this happened. Now, subsequent to the installation and implementation of the VMware Cloud Solution, there is no need for us to rely solely on a single storage controller. This makes things easy for us once the storage level application replicates our data to the DR site. This means that even if the entire primary site goes down, we can still fall back on the data and the application that is available on the DR site. This allows us to consistently maintain the state of our application and business data.

We feel the ability to move virtual machines while they are still running to be the most valuable feature. Consequently, the application can be migrated from one host to another in respects of virtual machines without the user taking notice.

The automation should be simplified or improved. Usually throughout the day, during peak periods, one or another task cannot be carried out. Moreover, if one wishes to move large data, the user's application response may be affected. So, it would be best if such tasks can be automated to allow such tasks to be undertaken not during peak periods. As a consequence, this would lessen the impact to the underlying resources. 

I would also like to see interoperability between various virtualization and cloud solutions. It would be nice to be able to move my VM from Windows or Hyper-V to VMware and from this to Citrix. The adding of these features would be awesome.

I have been using VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery since 2012. 

The solution is very stable. We have hardly had any issues with it. VMware is perfectly stable, except there is a problem with the underlying hardware infrastructure. 

The solution is very scalable. While using it we upgraded from 5.0 to 5.5, from this to 6.0, and from 6.0 to 6.7. As part of this process we also upgrade the underlying hardware. We are able to migrate our data with ease.

I found the support to be excellent. I am in Nigeria and, at the time, so we got the procurement through HPE Nigeria.
We benefit from VR support with HP, in addition to our support license which, too, is covered.

Before going with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery we used Windows Backup, solely for backing up the page. 

I found the initial setup to be okay. It doesn't require much to accomplish, as it is not very complex. Its installation and commencement are very easy.

The solution took less than a month, perhaps no more than two weeks, for us to deploy.

Yes, the solution was implemented through a vendor. Their customer support and service were excellent.

I feel the solution has given us a very good return on investment since having implemented it in 2012. At the time, I believe we implemented the 5.0 or 5.5. The solution has supported our business over the years and generated tens of millions of dollars in revenues. 

I would say VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is very expensive in comparison with other available virtualization solutions.

We did evaluate other solutions before settling on VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. We are talking about a global company that has a presence in Nigeria and other countries, where the clients were already implementing such solutions in the business units of these countries. As a consequence, we simply adopted the use of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. At the time we did contemplate alternatives.

The solution is mostly on-premises and private cloud.

There are as many as 100 users in our organization that are using the applications running on VMware.

I rate VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery as at least a nine out of ten.

The advice I would give to others who are considering implementing the solution is that they should do proper planning and make sure their needs are met. Someone who does not have the benefit of experts or support personnel may consider engaging an experienced consultant. This would minimize mistakes.